Books of the week

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Richard Evans Schultes was an American “plant explorer, scientist, lover of all things Indian and Amazonian” who devoted his life to studying the relationship between Amazonia’s botany and its people. He is known as the “father of ethnobotany” and as the catalyst of the psychedelic generation — he introduced William Burroughs and the beats to mind-altering plants. Schultes graduated from Harvard University and was offered a grant to study arrow poisons in Colombia. But his passion was for hallucinogenic plants and this drew him into the Amazon forest, which is